Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Wedding update!

Thanks to the peanut gallery for all the kind words and encouragement. I did decide to splurge and buy my ridiculous dress, and I love it! It makes me very happy. Also, it turns out that in a remarkable moment of insight and consideration for his guests, my brother decided to go with a different DC hotel, one on the metro line, instead of the Four Seasons. Awesome. Things are looking up.

Books!

Finished: I wrapped up Shut Up, I'm Talking, and it's awesome. It's also frustrating and a bit disheartening, but mostly just amusing. My plan is to loan it out to all my Jewish friends, in particular my new friend who works at the Israeli consulate here to find out if this Gregory Levey is full of shit or not.

Purchased: A dear friend gave me a bookstore gift certificate, so I picked up A Wrinkle in Time and Without You (and indulged in the latest Jason Mraz, because I'm a sucker for that new single). So over the long weekend I apparently turned into an 11 year old child who stayed up too late reading (not quite under my covers with a flashlight, but close).

Started: The Watchmen. Too early to tell, but it's so highly recommended by people I trust, I can't imagine I won't love it.

So back to A Wrinkle in Time. It's kind of like Neal Stephenson or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - A Wrinkle in Time has nerd cred. But I can remember picking it up as a child and really not liking it at all. Which sort of breaks my heart now that I've read it, because although I thoroughly enjoyed it this time around, it's just the sort of book I needed in my adolescence. And the fact that I didn't like it sort of makes me wonder if current me would even like teenage me very much. And then I started thinking about books that I do have an emotional attachment to from my youth, and most of those are from before adolescence (the Anne and Emily books, No Flying In the House). My teenage years were a literary wasteland, until I started fixating on end of the world books sometime in high school (Alas, Babylon, The White Plague, Malevil, Lucifer's Hammer) all of which I enjoyed, but none of which strummed anything important or meaningful inside me. I didn't even read Lord of the Rings until college. I feel like I missed out on that heady adolescent time when you're all emotional and latch on to stories and make them a part of you. Who was I from around 12 to 16 or so?

1 Comments:

I definitely think there are books you grow into. I think I first tried to read the Lord of the Rings at like 10 or 11. I had loved The Hobbit, and my brother had raved about LotR. I got 30 or so pages in, they hadn't left the Shire yet, and I said "WTF is this crap?!" and stopped reading. Came back in HS later and loved it.